Often quite bulky, with anything from buttons to pencil shavings and tinsel pasted on it, it’s the kind of stuff you hang on to long after you’ve turned the last pages. There was a time when you never had to buy a bookmark - a nephew or niece in primary school would have gifted you one, painstakingly cut and embellished under the beady eye of the craft teacher. The best part is, you can lose them without qualm. They sometimes jog your memories of books by having a famous quote about reading or literature printed on them. The most common bookmarks - slim rectangles made of thick paper - are slipped in by the cashier with your book purchases. A racy thriller can make do with the last electricity bill, which serves the additional purpose of reminding you to pay up.

For instance, I expect a deep red satin ribbon to peep out of the spine of a classic. Bookmarks are a comment on your assumptions about books. Leave the book face down and it will likely ruin the binding and cause the pages to fall off in no time. The trusted bookmark gets little attention and yet you shudder to think what would happen without it - pages would get dog-eared, scarring the precious volume for life. With a bookmark in place, there’s no more jumping ahead in plots or having to tediously retrace your steps through the pages.

With treasures like this in his possession, Popek has also written a book,įorgotten Bookmarks: A Bookseller’s Collection of Odd Things Lost Between the Pages, which catalogues his miraculous finds.Ī book like this may be forming in the mind of every book lover, given the kind of bookmarks we create or encounter - from sale tags, old receipts, boarding passes, a folded letter, an envelope, a coaster - anything that is slim enough not to distort the spine and get you back to your last read page can serve as a bookmark. The back of the book, facing the viewer, reads, “My eyes tired here” and the orange T-shirt of the man has the legend, “Compliments of your optometrist”. For instance, he displays a bookmark in the shape of a bespectacled man holding a book, staring at it with jaded eyes and an upturned mouth. Michael Popek runs a store for used books and (it follows) a blog called Forgotten Bookmarks, which features the “personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things” he has found tucked in the pages of the books.

Forgotten bookmarks by michael popek